As black men trying to navigate the world around us, it is often lost on us to take a breath, assess ourselves and our multifaceted health categories, do what we can to repair, and then move forward. Our individual experiences maybe similar under the banner of “Black Man”, but as we have all learned in our lives, alot of those experiences are subjective to how we respond to what comes our way. If your reading this, chances are traveling is a means of coping, and escape for you. God knows it is for me and alot of us.
I said all that to set the stage for what I wanted to talk about. I technically have been traveling for years. Being born in the Bahamas, my family moved to Florida and most of my international trips consisted of the regular stuff. Haiti, because I’m Haitian, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cancun, and Aruba. Fast forward, I am divorced after a 5-year marriage, and after some research and multiple YouTube videos, I learned about Black men traveling and finding levels of paradise we thought to only belong to the privileged. It was through experiencing culture shock and networking to eventually forming associations with fellow black male travelers that put things into perspective for me when I returned to the matrix. Each trip afterward was more eye-opening than the one prior. Certain things didn’t get to me. I observed more than I spoke, which allowed me to avoid the things most of us get pulled into like family guilt trips, money pits, and pursuing tales blindly. And that are just a few.
A few years later and my older brother is now going through a nasty divorce of his own. His situation is direr than mine was as there are children and a home he built from the ground up with his bare hands at stake. He voluntarily moved out and left everything behind just to sleep on a mattress in our parent's house. According to him, the best sleep he has had in years. He is now dealing with threats to his future, his reputation, and his finances by an overbearing, overweight, socially working Ursula broad. Watching him stress over it all was too much to just not do anything, so I encouraged him to get his passport and now we are scheduled for a quick weekend in DR. My hope is to gift him what I had to dig to find….Peace of mind through jumping on a plane to a world unknown.
I encourage my brothers to do the same for another brother in need. Blood pressure, Stress, and a broken heart are silent killers. A lot of us have been bred to not take the easy way out, but not taught the process to heal, but to just deal. Fuck that! Find your happiness, and don’t let anyone make you feel guilty in pursuit of it. Many are living their paradise now. Their heaven now. Fuck with a preacher or a bible-wielding feminist has to say about you literally having to die to see God and his place for you at his side. Many trusted institutions have steered the black man into an early grave. I say break the mold. Buy that ticket, see the world, and come back armed to the teeth with a zest for life, and stoic benign neglect for all things fuckery.
Comments